1. EXCITED Workshop Suvrajeet Sen, DMII, ENG – CI Coordinator Workshop
Please feel free to make changes to these notes to reflect the thinking in your Division. We will prepare a more complete document after Thanksgiving.
Workshop
Feb. 28

2. Cyberinfrastructure “Atkins report”
A computational infrastructure integrating data, models, hardware, and software for research and education
Opening doors to new types of scientific/engineering research and education.
Promoting greater collaboration via shared resources (data, models, software, physical assets)

3. Other Reports
National Science Board Report NSB (February 6, 2003)
John A. White, Jr. Chair
Recommends that NSF emphasize the development and deployment of an advanced CI for new research in science and engineering
Office of Management and Budget director Josh Bolten and White House Science and Technology Policy Office director John Marburger asked officials to focus their 2006 budget requests on “supercomputing and cyberinfrastructure” (Government Computer News, August 18, 2004)

4. What will ENG Strategy Be?
Will adopt a “Systems View”
Without a “Systems View” . . .
we will build special-purpose CIs for every domain
there will be few common threads, and costs of developing and maintaining each CI will exceed our budgetary requests
Must integrate lessons learned from CIs in other fields:
GEON (Geoscience)
NEON (Ecology)
NEES (Earthquake Engineering)
NNIN (Nanotechnology)
CLEANER (Environmental Engineering)

5. Current CI Trends Communities are being provided access to data sets
Most data sets are outputs of simulations
Scientific communities have few experts who develop fine grained simulations
These simulations may be run on HEC platforms
Output of simulations are very large data sets that are communicated through networking
Globus, Condor and similar tools for grid computing
Tools available for large scale numerical simulation
Tools for “Teleoperations” through NEES

6. Challenges for ENG Applications Layer Interfaces for Sharing
Model outputs for visualization
Models, Algorithms (Need Languages)
Data from Sensors, Access to Actuators
Layer for Models and Algorithms
Simulation, Optimization, Statistical and Visualization Software
General purpose “Hooks” into FEM Packages, Matlab and access to open source algorithms
CI: CyberInfrastructure (CyberPlatforms)
Security
Tele-operation (“Hooks” to Sensors and Actuators)
Access to HEC on demand

7. ENG Community CI - an opportunity for “big-picture” thinking
CI - an opportunity for ENG community to coalesce
EXCITED about CI-ENG!